The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) (19 page)

Ella walked faster until she was level with him and could loop her arm through his.

‘You’re right. He’s an idiot,’ she said. ‘So don’t let him get to you. I certainly won’t. Come on. Let’s go and get a drink. My treat. I owe you.’ 

The Story of the River

‘You know, they used to say, in the town where Madaar-Bozorg was born,’ said Fabbia, threading her needle with silver embroidery cotton, ‘which is a place where the corn is watered each year by a wide river and where tall flowers grow all over the grassy banks, that there was once a very beautiful young woman.

‘They said that her face was like an open flower and her waist was as supple as a green stem. She could dance like the fast-flowing river and she could sing like the birds on the banks. Any man who set eyes on her wanted to have her as his wife, but she couldn’t marry because her father couldn’t afford a dowry.

‘A rich man, passing through the town, decided to seduce her anyway. He told her that he’d no interest in cattle and cornfields. He’d enough gold of his own, enough to make more bracelets than she could ever wear on both arms. And the young woman, who knew nothing at all of the word outside the village, gave herself to him with a trusting heart.  She lived with him in a house by the river, with windows that shone with reflections of the water. With the next harvest moon, her belly grew round and tight as a drum and she gave birth to twin daughters.

‘A few years passed and the young woman was happy. She sat on the riverbank and played with her daughters. The first words they learned were the names of the flowers that grew there in the long grasses and the songs of the birds that swooped low over the water.

‘But then the rich man told her that he was returning to the lands he came from. His father had ordered him to make a marriage of convenience which would secure the family’s fortunes for generations to come.

‘ “I’ll take the girls with me, “ he said. “They’ll be cared for and they’ll have every opportunity that they do not have here. I’ll make fine marriages for them and they’ll grow up to be fine women, not the wives of fishermen or farmers.”

‘The young woman tore at her hair and ran her fingernails down her cheeks. She begged him and shrieked at him. She went mad with the thought that she would lose her cherished daughters.

‘She felt as if her heart was a water-snail’s shell, pulled out of her chest and dashed against the river stones by this man she’d so foolishly allowed herself to love.

‘That night, in a craze of grief, she tucked a daughter beneath each arm and ran to the river and dived deep into the middle of the current. The children drowned and the young woman drowned with them and their bodies sank to the bottom of the river where the hungry fish picked their bones clean.

‘The rich man returned to his family and married the woman who’d been chosen for him. He was secretly very relieved that his father would never now need to know anything about his secret family.

‘For seven days and seven nights, the soul of the young woman sat on the bottom of the river. On the eighth day, it flew from the cool dark of the river up into the light again. It shimmered in a haze of purest white over the surface of the water. It tried to shape itself into a body - into arms and legs and a mouth and fingers - but gradually, as the sun rose, it faded away.

‘And they say that now, on any night of the year, you can see the young woman walking the banks of the river. Her hair flows down her back like weeds and her clothes are soaked with tears. She crouches on the riverbank and stirs the water with her long white fingers. She’s looking for the shapes of her dead daughters’ souls.

‘When the river is full and ready to burst its banks, they say that the river woman must be wailing and crying for her daughters and that the river can no longer hold all her tears.

‘And this is why young girls must never go near the river after dark, for the river woman may mistake them for her own children and tuck them in the folds of her watery cloak and carry them away with her forever.

*

‘I don’t want you going there, Ella.
Basta.
That’s final,’ said Mamma. ‘What will people think of me? That I’m a no-good mother with a daughter running wild all over the place?’

Ella folded her arms across her chest.

‘Mum, why are you listening to what one of your stuck-up customers says? What do they know? Everyone else goes there.’

Fabbia raised her eyebrow. ‘My customers are stuck-up now, are they? Well, if it’s alright with you, young lady, I need my customers, every one of them… Have you ever stopped to think that without my customers we wouldn’t have food on the table or this roof over our heads? Hm?’ Then she sighed. ‘And, anyway, Ella. There are some things… some things… You know, it’s far, far too easy to get a reputation when you’re a girl.’

‘A
reputation
?’

Fabbia saw the anger flash in Ella’s eyes. Despite herself, she felt a strange kind of relief. Hadn’t she been waiting for Ella to push against her a little? Hadn’t she wanted her to start being less of a good girl?

‘We’re not living in one of your 1950s fantasies, Mum,’ Ella was saying. ‘Well,
you
can if you want, but I don’t see why I have to. And anyway, I don’t understand you. You’re always saying yourself that women can do everything men can, only better….’

Fabbia sighed. She picked up a string of green glass beads and wound them around her finger.

‘You know,
tesora,’
she said, slowly, ‘actually, you are right. You are so, so right. But I also know another thing, something I have learnt myself, the hard way. It’s different for boys. It’s different for Billy. And that’s just how it is. Infuriating, yes. Unfair, oh yes. But it’s how things are… So we have to be a little bit clever. And if you hang around in a swimming costume down by the river, on your own with a boy, people like Mrs Moffat will see you. And they’ll talk. They’ll come in here and make their little jokes, their little comments to me. All very careful, all very
by the way
... But is that
really
what you want?’

She reached out to touch Ella’s arm but Ella shook her away.

‘Anyway, David says that you can catch all kinds of disease from river water… There are rats down there, rats with germs. And green slimy stuff…. How do you say?’

Behind her, on cue, the shop door jangled cheerfully to David, swinging his doctor’s bag.

‘Algae,’ he said. ‘Green slimy stuff. Sorry to be a party pooper, Ella. It’s just that I treated a young man, friend of Billy’s I believe, just the other week for a particularly nasty skin condition. Told me he’d been playing down on that platform they’ve rigged up down there…’

Ella sighed. ‘I don’t know anyone else who’s been ill…’

‘Well,’ David pressed on. ‘I’ve been thinking, you know, since your mum mentioned it to me, and I’ve had an idea.’ He turned to Fabbia, beaming. ‘I might have come up with a solution.’

There was something about David that refused to be sulked at, thought Fabbia. She watched Ella try to hold on to the tight little ball of her anger but David just smiled and smiled. His face shone with a sense of his own usefulness. ‘I’ve a surprise for you. I think you’ll like it.’

*

It was typical. Just typical, Jean Cushworth grumbled to herself. These ridiculous communal changing-rooms. They were everywhere now. And you were just expected to fit in, to do away with your decorum. She was going to have a word with the manager, make her feelings known.

It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her body. Not exactly. But there was always that awkward moment when you had to let the towel drop. You had to fiddle with your bra behind your back and your skin was still damp so that everything took more time but you tried to do it all as quickly as you could because perhaps you didn’t exactly want to show your breasts and your bare backside to all and sundry.

She’d been balancing on one leg, stepping into her knickers, at the precise moment when the Morenos appeared.

Fabbia hadn’t missed a beat, of course. Jean noticed that she didn’t do that thing that so many other women do of surreptitiously looking you up and down, comparing.

No, she’d kept her eyes on Jean’s face and smiled that sickeningly beautiful smile.

‘How lovely to see you,’ Jean said, reaching for her bra, pulling her shirt over her head as quickly as she could. ‘I didn’t know you were members here.’

The girl hung back a little, looking nervously around the changing-room.

‘We’re just guests at the moment,’ Fabbia explained. ‘David very kindly arranged it for us. Well, for Ella, really.’

She was wearing a kaftan covered in enormous swirls of colour – pink and turquoise and yellow – that stopped at the top of her tanned thighs. She’s lucky she has that kind of skin, thought Jean. Olive. Always has colour. She was suddenly even more self-conscious of her own unsunned flesh.

Fabbia adjusted the strap of the beachbag on her shoulder. Her arms clacked with thick Perspex bangles.

‘That’s quite an outfit!’ Jean said, realising that she was staring, her gaze travelling all the way down Fabbia’s legs to her feet in a pair of turquoise wedges with cork platform heels.

‘Oh, you know,’ smiled Fabbia, apparently unfazed. ‘I’m doing the 60s thing today. The smallest hint of sunshine always brings it out in me. Anyway, how are you, Jean? How are the preparations for the party? You must be so busy.’

And that was what she did, thought Jean. She was good at it too. Always interested. Knew what to say and when to say it. Remembered every detail. But it meant that you never learned anything about her. She didn’t give anything away.

And the girl. There was just something about her that was quite unnerving. She was a pretty little thing, Jean thought. No denying that. But she seemed so awkward, so uncomfortable in her own skin. Jean noticed that she’d disappeared into another bay of lockers to get changed, tucking herself carefully away from view.

When she appeared again she was wearing possibly the most ugly swimsuit that Jean could imagine. One of those black sports Speedo things, for goodness’ sake, with the high neck and ugly flashes down the side.

She’d clutched her towel to her front, self-consciously. Really, she couldn’t be any more different from her mother.

What was it about that girl? Jean couldn’t put her finger on it. The way she looked at you with those enormous eyes. Were they green or blue? She couldn’t quite remember. You felt it go straight through you.

*

Ella dives deeper. Fingers, elbows, feet. Flickers of white in the turquoise water.

At the bottom of the pool, everything recedes. There’s only the faint hum of the filters, the fresh scent of cleaned water.

Down here, she’s no longer a girl but a woman with long hair that flows out all around her. Sometimes she’s a bird flying across the blue bottom. Red beak and green tail feathers. Wake of pink petals. Fish-bird, bird-fish. Swimming above her shadow. 

Again and again, she returns here, hanging her jeans and T-shirt in the locker, balling her socks in her shoes, putting on the blue water.

Sometimes she floats motionless for long minutes on her back. Clouds float too over the sky’s curve, making a map like the world photographed from space. Another part of her, the deeper part, the part of her mind that goes quiet and then quieter, that can shrink to its own still centre, looks out from her eyes, unspools itself, floats out over the surface of the water.

The sky rolls above her, a gigantic eyeball veined with white. What does the sky see?

This. She. Lick of salt and roar of water.

If only she could stay here forever.

*

I wonder, Ella scribbled in her notebook, what it feels like to wake up in the morning and remember that today is the day that you marry a prince? Katrina says that she’d Rather Kill Herself. No one would dare to talk to you any more or tell you Anything Interesting.

Billy says that the Royal Family was invented by the toffs to keep other people in their places. Chase the lot of ‘em out of Buckingham Palace and turn it into something useful. Like what, for instance? Oh, a hospital or a university. Something like that. Yes, he’d like to think of all those oil paintings of stuffy old blokes in ruffs and pantaloons tossed on a gigantic bonfire. Mrs Queen stacking shelves or sitting at a checkout. Mr Queen doing people’s gardens.

Billy, of course, hadn’t been invited to Katrina’s party. Instead, he was going to a Not The Royal Wedding Party in the pub at the end of his road, which sounded like a lot more fun.

Mamma had been up half the night for weeks with all the orders. There were so many parties and dinners and fêtes and none of her ladies could be seen wearing anything the slightest bit similar. But everyone wanted the same. Very full skirt or very, very fitted skirt, absolutely nothing in between. 

‘How will they walk in that?’ Billy said, staring in disbelief at a tight sheath dress in red silk.

‘I know. And it’s shorter, always shorter, can you make it shorter?’ laughed Mamma.

‘All this fuss, ‘ Billy said, ‘and it’s going to rain royal cats and dogs, anyway.’

It had rained all week. The shop in the courtyard groaned and creaked as the floorboards and rafters expanded, contracted.

Between downpours, the cobbles shimmered under clouds of midges. The wood in the window frames swelled until they couldn’t be opened and the bathroom taps ran brown with river water, streaking the towels with rusty marks. There was a kind of clammy vapour to everything, even inside the shop, so that Mamma began to worry about the fabrics.

‘It reminds me of home,’ she said. ‘The rainy season. Everything warm and wet for weeks.’

Ella was surprised to hear Mamma talk of ‘home’ in that way. For as long as she could remember, she’d avoided it, expertly brushing off Ella’s questions.

Most people presumed she was Italian. Some guessed she was Middle Eastern, born in France. By now, Mamma’s real story had been lost somewhere in the layers and layers of all the other stories she told so that even Ella didn’t know where it really began.